All are victims of tar sands mining in the Boreal Forest of Alberta, Canada. And we are the largest importers.

Kids Want to Protect Wildlife

Last Saturday morning, my daughter noticed I was on my Blackberry communicating with someone from work. “What are you doing,” she asked me, in that familiar impatient tone. I turned to her, and without hesitation I said: “How do we get more people to care about the fact that wolves are being poisoned in Canada because of tar sands?”

She then turned to me, and immediately announced that she will donate $7.00 to our cause—seven weeks of allowance.

She was motivated because she, like most young children, have an uncluttered sense of what’s morally right and wrong. There’s nothing that clouds their judgment. What a contrast to what we are facing every day in Congress these days. Elected officials of both party persuasions are wringing their hands on what to do about the White House’s decision to halt the permitting of Keystone XL, which, if built, would’ve been the largest tar sands oil pipeline snaking through the nation’s Heartland. Allies of the oil industry are teaming the halls of Congress to find any lever to pull to reverse the decision.

My 9-year-old daughter doesn’t understand why people who are in government aren’t standing up for the wolves. I wonder why are they not standing up to Big Oil’s insatiable greed and indifference.

She also wonders, understandably, whether a $7.00 donation will make a difference, knowing that we are up against a multi-billion dollar oil industry.

Join & Make a Difference

Motivating others to join her, that’s the difference $7 can make. Imagine if just one percent of the children in the U.S. between the ages of 10-14 donated $7.00? One percent is about 200,000 children…you can do the math.

The point is that if we stand together, unpolluted by politics and oil profits, united about what’s morally right, we can shift the political debate. And our legacy will be that we stood up for those who don’t have a voice.